How F.P.Journe became “a full-blooded cultural icon”

Earlier this month, a nine-minute bidding war resulted in a single sale of $13.9 million at Phillips’s New York Watch Auction. 

The timepiece in question, an F.P.Journe Chronomètre à Résonance ‘Souscription, No. 007’ in platinum and pink gold, has become the most expensive timepiece ever auctioned by an independent watchmaker.

It’s a truly beautiful watch, featuring the resonance complication that François-Paul Journe made his name with in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The ‘Souscription, No. 007’ is one of 20 Journe made for his initial investors (or subscribers), who helped to fund his watch brand’s early days. With such rarity, history, and back story, it was always going to attract fierce bidding at auction. 

Journe’s journey began in Paris, where he started his career working as a watch and clock restorer alongside his uncle, Michel Journe. From restoration came the urge for creation, and he started making one-off complicated watches for private clients and brands.

In 1999, he took inspiration from Abraham-Louis Breguet, and offered subscribers opportunities to invest in F.P.Journe, a new watchmaking brand. Its motto, Invenit et Fecit (Latin for “Invented and Made”) reflects the watchmaker’s vertically integrated approach, with nearly every component made in its own manufacture. 

That year, it launched its Tourbillon Souverain, the first serially produced wristwatch with a remontoir d’égalité (a device that delivers a consistent flow of energy to a watch). In 2000, the Chronomètre à Résonance, perhaps Journe’s most famous creation, was unveiled. 

Over the following 26 years, F.P.Journe would become renowned for its technical innovation and originality, as well as its use of classical horological techniques. Demand grew and grew, fuelled by a limited supply — the manufacture only makes about 1,000 pieces a year. 

The brand has come to be viewed as one of the few modern makers producing genuinely original horology, with its achievements recognised by the industry — it’s the only three-time winner of the Grand Prix de l’Aiguille d’Or at the GPHG.

The recent Phillips sale was entirely precedented, then, with few other modern watchmakers generating the same level of collector enthusiasm. The brand has been strong at auction since at least 2016, when the Tourbillon Souverain Blue sold at an Only Watch charity event for CHF 550,000 — a sign of things to come. In a precursor to these latest events, Francis Ford Coppola’s F.P. Journe was auctioned off for $10.75 million in October 2025. In May, at the Geneva Watch Auction XXIII the Chronomètre à Résonance ‘Souscription, No. 018’ went for CHF 4,875,500. Three further F.P. Journe models made over CHF 1 million each. 

Phillips is now framing Journe as more akin to an artist than a watchmaker, pointing to the fact that F.P.Journe merchandise is now making hefty money at auction too — it also sold a branded hard hat for CHF 10,975 at its Geneva Sessions in Spring 2026. “Journe now sits in the rare space where serious scholarship, record-breaking prices, and broader cultural recognition overlap,” writes Logan Baker for the auction house. “We’re no longer talking about a cult or collector favorite — we’re talking about a full-blooded cultural icon.”

It’s been an extremely quick rise to the top for F.P. Journe, and a quarter of a century is not a long time at all in the watchmaking world. With the ‘icon’ status comes the added pressure to continue at the same level of success. It remains to be seen whether the brand can preserve its distinctive character and independence while operating under a much larger spotlight in the future.